


Your farthest shore

by handfuloftime



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Guilt, Post-Canon, crozier/ross if you're really looking for it, sort of a character study? i don't actually know what this is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:40:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26204329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handfuloftime/pseuds/handfuloftime
Summary: James Ross dreams of Victory Point.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 19





	Your farthest shore

Afterwards—after the president has read out McClintock's telegram and the meeting has dissolved into shouting and speculation, after young James's arm and a couple of glasses of Scotch have kept him upright through the rest of the afternoon, after an interminable supper at which there's only one topic of conversation—James sits in the unfamiliar dark of the rented room and wonders whether it's worth trying to sleep. Whether sitting here alone with his thoughts would be worse than what he'll face in his dreams.

Young James has dropped off already, snoring contentedly on the other side of the room. James sighs and closes his eyes. Prays for a peaceful sleep that he hardly deserves.

When the dreams come, they're not what he's expecting. Nightmares have a worn-in, almost familiar quality by now. Sweating in that Netsilik tent as he waits for an answer that he won't understand. Wandering the bleak expanse of King William Land, trying not to tread on the bleached and split bones among the rocks, in terror of what he'll find next. Being hunted by some nameless dreadful thing. Images strung together from the fragments of a disaster that he still can't see the full shape of. _A creature made of muscles and spells_. What little he knows, he almost wishes he didn't. _From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the kettles..._ All he can do is wait, frozen, for another message—translated and garbled and passed from person to person to person until it's lost all but the tiniest sliver of enlightenment.

He knows, now, but he still doesn't understand. _Why that way, Francis? What_ happened _?_

Instead he finds himself on a barren shore, amid great slabs and heaves of ice, under a dark sky. No light save the thin ribbons of the aurora. And inland, off in the distance, barely visible—a figure.

James runs to it, scrambling over the shales, but before he's covered half the space he realizes that it's not a man at all. It's a cairn.

Of course. How could he have expected anything else?

Almost thirty years later, the cairn at Victory Point looks just as it had on the day he and Abernethy had built it. McClintock's men will have pulled it apart to get at the message, but here it looms solid and untouched, the only thing in sight for miles. A pillar marking the ends of the earth. James rests his hand on one of the stones, feels the cold bite at his fingers. He can remember placing the stones, his hands working mechanically while he chewed over the possibilities: if he sent some of the men back, if he cut all of their rations even further, if they found more game, if, if, if. Were they a week from Cape Turnagain, or more? Would the weather hold? They were so _close_. But, in the end, close was nothing.

He'd said as much to Francis that awful third season in the south, as they clawed every mile from the winds and the pack ice, all the while knowing that the magnetic pole might as well be on the moon for all that they could get at it. When he'd thought that the disappointment would be the worst thing that ever happened to him. _It's worse than anything._

Francis had told him to get over himself, and tousled his hair until he couldn't help but laugh.

James slumps at the foot of the cairn and rests his head in his hands. Tries not to think of Francis standing here, weary and uncertain and carrying the weight of the whole expedition on his shoulders. He and his men preparing to march to their deaths. He must have known it was impossible. He must have.

When he wakes, in the grey hours before dawn, his face is stiff with salt.

The Association meeting ends, and he and James go home to a quiet house. The dreams follow him. Why shouldn't they? The papers are full of McClintock's discoveries, and his correspondence is too. It's all that anyone can talk about: that his friends are finally, definitely dead. So, on the nights that he sleeps, he dreams of the Arctic more often than not. Sometimes it's the old nightmares again; other times he's back aboard _Enterprise_ , so weak from the last sledge trip that he can barely leave his bed. He wakes sweating and shaken, reaching for Anne without thinking, and a different misery breaks over him. 

But mostly it's the cairn. The cairn and its message: a whisper in the dark. A hand reaching out to him from across a vast distance.

James takes the cairn apart with his hands. Silent labor under the eerie light of the aurora, fumbling in ill-fitting gloves, until it gives up its secrets. It's something different every time. A fistful of brass buttons. A microscopic sea creature, preserved under glass. A tarnished teaspoon. A feather. He takes his gloves off and cradles it in his bare hands. As though touching it will make its dead language decipherable, will summon up the ghost that left it behind. _What did Francis say?_

He's so close to understanding. Like something at the corner of his eye: if he just turned around fast enough, the knowledge would be there. But the ruins of the cairn remind him: this is as far as you go. Here shall thy proud waves be stayed. 

He'll never really know.

If the first winter hadn't been so severe, if the sledge parties had gone farther, if his health had held up. If, if. If. _I feel satisfied that we shall not be found wanting_ , he'd written, light-hearted and sanguine. Sure that he'd return to England only to find Francis there as well, with a knighthood and a draft of his memoirs, and they'd all have a good laugh. Or that they'd shake hands on Fury Beach and go home together, hungry and ragged but alive. What a fool he'd been.

As he looks up from the relic in his hands, James thinks he sees movement, just for a second. Off in the distance, at the very horizon. Something just out of reach.

When he looks again, it's gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Partially inspired by @[indifferent-century](https://indifferent-century.tumblr.com/)'s wonderful [drawing](https://indifferent-century.tumblr.com/post/189728641076/we-are-gone-a-submission-for-the-terror-bingo-in) of JCR at the Victory Point cairn. 
> 
> According to the preface to McClintock's _The Voyage of the 'Fox' in the Arctic Seas_ , a telegram announcing McClintock's "success" (no further specifics given, so I've chosen to interpret that as conveying what he'd learned from the Victory Point note) arrived at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Scotland in September 1859, a meeting at which James Clark Ross was present. His son James Coulman Ross was elected to the society that year (at the ripe old age of fourteen!), so it's quite possible he was there as well.
> 
> Quotations: "From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the kettles" is from Dr. Rae's 1854 report to the Admiralty; "Here shall thy proud waves be stayed" is from Job 38:11 (King James Version); "I feel satisfied that we shall not be found wanting" is from a January 1848 letter from Ross to Crozier, which was later returned undelivered.


End file.
